CHAMPAIGN, Ill.—What Illinois coach John Groce wanted most out of Saturday afternoon’s game was not his first-ever Big Ten Conference victory. (Which he got.) It was not a triumph over the coach, Ohio State’s Thad Matta, who once was his boss and still his is friend. (Got that, too, obviously.) What he wanted was a good night’s sleep. (Like a baby, no doubt.)

Before facing the eighth-ranked Buckeyes, the No. 11 Fighting Illini had dropped two of their previous three games, but the defeats were nothing alike to Groce. In his first season at Illinois, he has stressed two concepts above all else with his players: Toughness and togetherness. In losing the Big Ten Conference opener at Purdue on Wednesday, he sensed neither.

“Here’s what I felt like: When I laid my head down on my pillow after the game, I wanted to say—like I did after we got beat by Missouri—I laid my head down that night and said, ‘Those are my guys,’ ” Groce said. “I just wanted to feel that way tonight, regardless of the score.”

The score will help: Illinois 74, Ohio State 55. Yeah, it’ll help a lot.

As the game progressed, it was hard to escape the feeling it was a bit too easy to be tougher than the Buckeyes on this day. OSU turned over the ball 11 times in the first half, which is more than its per-game average. The Illini won the rebounding battle easily. They committed 12 turnovers of their own in a half-hearted second half but never encountered even the slightest challenge from an Ohio State team that now has lost each of its games against ranked opponents and is a week into the New Year without a quality win.

The Buckeyes’ No. 8 ranking certainly looks pretty, and their 11-3 record isn’t bad. But like many teams expected to be among college basketball’s best, they are not having an easy time with the most elementary and essential of the game’s requirements: Putting the ball in the basket.

When they can take it from an opponent and run down the floor before anyone can react, the Buckeyes score plenty. Restricted to the half court, however, they have been average or slightly above in nearly every category delineated by Synergy Sports Technologies: Spot-up shooting, pick-and-roll, isolation. Against their three top opponents—Duke, Kansas and the Illini—the Buckeyes shot 32.6 percent from the floor and 25.4 percent on 3-pointers.

“I’m not, like, panicking. ‘Oh my God,’ ” Matta said Saturday night. “These guys have played some good basketball. We just have to get to that, but knowing that it gets tougher and tougher each game.”

This is not the place to go to search for answers. And by “this” we do not specifically mean Illinois’ Assembly Hall, although it does provide an ideal example for the discussion. We are talking about the Big Ten road. This is a conference where opponents rarely can count on visiting a lifeless, half-empty gym and hoping to steal one from a disillusioned opponent.

The Big Ten has led Division I in attendance pretty much since the NCAA began keeping track of such things. Given the expectations and acclaim for several league members this season, if there were a stat for how far over face value one must venture to secure a ticket via StubHub, the Big Ten probably would dominate. (Lower level for Michigan at Indiana on Feb 2? Got $440 on you?)

This also is a season in which six Big Ten teams were ranked in the most recent AP top 25, which isn’t the ideal measure of strength but does say something. The league is so far in front of other college conferences in terms of Conference RPI, it’s almost in the NBA.

The Illini discovered for themselves how difficult it will be to win on the road when they opened their Big Ten schedule Wednesday at Purdue—which already had losses against Bucknell and Eastern Michigan—and found the Boilermakers to be suddenly inspired to play as though they’d been possessed by the ghost of Brian Cardinal. The Illini competed as though they’d been haunted.

“I was just disappointed because that’s not who we’ve been,” Groce said. “You can’t win some of the games we have in some of the environments where we’ve won if you’re soft. We’ve been pretty tough. We’ve been together. We’ve done it before. We just needed to get back to doing those things again.”

The Illinois players knew they had to be better, particularly in the departments Groce emphasizes most. That’s why he put them through “toughness drills” in practices ahead of the OSU game.

“We fought hard,” said star guard Brandon Paul, who scraped his way to 19 points on a day when he couldn’t find his 3-point touch. “We competed every day in practice, and he tells us, ‘You deserve to have a good game.’ ”

Asked to describe those toughness drills, Paul was interrupted by Groce, who said with a chuckle, “I don’t want to get in trouble.” Paul agreed not to spill any secrets but spoke generally of getting physical, diving on the floor for loose balls, taking charges.

These are demands that are easier to meet when the thousands of cheering fans in the audience are cheering specifically for you. When the Illini finished scrubbing the Assembly Hall floor with the Buckeyes, there had been eight Big Ten games contested, with all but two won by the home team. The only teams to win on the road were the two favored to contend for the conference and national championships: Michigan and Indiana.

That connects with what Groce said teams will need to achieve any success on the Big Ten road: “Experience. Toughness. The ability to deal with adversity and success I think is important. I think leadership is important. And I think players making plays—big-time players making plays.”

Ohio State’s big-time players, Deshaun Thomas and Aaron Craft, did not meet that standard Saturday. And now they’ll be the ones asked, on Tuesday, to enter Mackey Arena and conquer the Purdue Boilermakers. Matta promises a long film session to dissect the errors that accumulated at Illinois.

“We’ve got to learn from it, but at the same time we’ve got to get ourselves ready to just play better basketball,” Matta said. “There are certain games you’ve got to push it to the side and get onto the next.”